President Zuma, we need to discuss a few pressing matters

The 100-year old African National Congress, mulled over a dozen Discussion Documents, during your party’s Policy Conference, which give an idea of the policies that will be adopted by the Government led (I use the term loosely) by you after the 53^rd ANC National Elective Conference in December.

The problem I have is that documents are being attributed to individual senior party officials rather than the collective movement and branches that, with the rest of South Africa, will be directly affected by these documents once they are adopted by the Government in the form of policy.

If the ANC was brutally honest with itself, conference delegates should have rejected all the Discussion Documents and called for the implementation of existing policies which have failed to reach full fruition. ANC officials, both at Luthuli House and at the Union Buildings have stated that Governments problem is not policy but that of implementation.

It is clear that a new leadership is needed to take South Africa forward by implementing policies, which are gathering dust. As you said, Mr President, a “radical shift” is needed.

Analysts, commentators and even some officials in your party have berated, in one way or another, the ‘Second Transition’ Discussion Document. Political analyst Eusebius McKaiser summed it up as being “nonsense” and your lieutenant, Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe criticised the “Marxist jargon” used in the document.

If we are to insist on a second transition for South Africa, the transition should pave the way for a modern leader who truly understands the challenges faced by South Africa and a transition towards a change in our electoral system, which allows citizens to hold office bearers directly accountable, post-elections.

Unfortunately, the ANC has, since becoming a governing party, allowed “alien tendencies” to creep in, and in some instances these tendencies have been encouraged, though not explicitly.   It is almost as if corruption, disrespect and suppression of (differing) views have been adopted as accepted practices in Government and the ANC.

Personalities now reign supreme over the collective. When songs were sung in the name of Tambo, Luthuli and Mandela, it was because they represented what the collective ANC envisaged as a leader who held the interests of the movement at heart.

Today, when songs are sung in the name of post-1994 ANC leaders, it is for what that personality can do to better the financial and social status of a faction with sinister motives.

The ANC has turned its back on the principles of 1912 and 1994.

Mr President, I do not think that you are fit to take the ANC and the country to a higher level, which frankly, since 2009 you have not shown that you have the ability to do so.

For the sake of the broader needs of South Africa and the century old ANC, I ask that you do not stand for re-election of the ANC and the Republic, regardless of what the branches ask of you.

Please put the interests of the country above your own, Mr Zuma.